No joking matter (actually, it was)
Yesterday, we talked about a glitch on GGPoker that wreaked havoc across the online poker room. As we said, though things like that sometimes happen online, internet poker mostly avoids some of the problems of live poker, such as misdeals. And hoo boy, was there an entertaining misdeal the other day in the 2022 PokerNews Cup at the Golden Nugget.
During the $1,100 No-Limit Hold’em event on Monday, Day 2 of the series, a couple players were all-in pre-flop, a tense moment in any tournament. Then the dealer laid out the flop: 2♥-Joker-9♦.
Yes, that was a Joker. I suppose it is a face card of sorts, but it is not supposed to be there. This was a No-Limit Hold’em tournament, not No-Limit Joker’s Wild Hold’em or any sort of offbeat home game, so that jester posed a bit of a problem.
Fortunately, based on the video posted by a player, it seems that everyone had a sense of humor about it. After all, shit happens. As one might expect, the floor ruled the hand dead, chips were returned to players, and they moved on to the next hand. The hand did not count.
One might argue that they could just replace the Joker with another flop card because the Joker did not affect the cards that had been dealt before it. Likewise, the dealer could check the burn cards to be sure there wasn’t a Joker there that affected the flop cards. But really, to avoid any problems, any sort of controversy, the easiest and wisest thing is to just cancel the hand (and of course, you have to follow the official tournament rulebook).
Online glitch the same day
As mentioned, on that same day, an online poker tournament on GGPoker had a problem during a hand. In this case, the deal was fine, but the determination of who won the pot went horribly wrong. For all of internet poker’s benefits, here was a time where the lack of a human dealer caused a serious problem.
In the $10,300 Super High Roller event of the GGPoker Super MILLION$, “Tom_Poker_NL” and Simon Mattsson were all-in pre-flop, Tom with Tens and Mattsson with Queens. The community cards ran out K-6-K-7-5, giving both players two pair, but Mattsson obviously the better two pair with Kings and Queens against Kings and Tens. Mattsson doubles up and the tournament continues.
But wait, the GGPoker software awarded the pot to Tom, thus eliminating Mattsson from the tournament. How did this happen?
It was some sort of weird programming glitch. To GGPoker’s credit, it got to the bottom of things pretty quickly after it was alerted to the problem. For some reason, the software treated the hand like it was a Flip & Go, a game in which each player is dealt three hole cards and can discard one before automatically being put all-in. As was evident from the hand history, the software discarded one of Mattsson’s Queens, thus giving him a worse hand than Tom’s. GGPoker canceled all tournaments while it investigated the issue and refunded players.